Probability Sun (10 page)

Kaufman hoped the answer wasn’t going to make their job here harder than it already was.

EIGHT

THE NEURY MOUNTAINS

T
he electronic perimeter circled the base a quarter click from the shuttle pad, now empty since the shuttle had returned to the
Alan B. Shepard
for its second load of personnel. A small group of aliens milled around beyond the perimeter. One lay on the ground. As soon as Lyle Kaufman saw them, he knew what had happened.

“Turn off the perimeter,” he said to Security Chief Heller.

“Sir, that isn’t—”

“Turn it off.”

“Yes, sir,” she said unhappily.

The shock from the electric field was not enough to seriously hurt a human. But these were not humans, Kaufman reminded himself. Their physiology, although based on the same DNA as humanity, was nonetheless subtly different. Plus, coming up against an invisible source of pain would be a shock in itself for people who had not yet discovered electricity. Plus, they’d been coming in peace.

“May your flowers bloom forever,” Kaufman said in English to the group as a whole.

“I rejoice in your garden,” an alien said, also in English. She (he?) was large in size compared to the others. Next to him (her?), a little in front of the others, stood an even bigger alien whose skin gleamed with some sort of oil. Both of them scowled in what looked like pain.

“I am so sorry I bring no hospitality blossoms,” Kaufman said, hoping the alien’s English stretched that far. There hadn’t supposed to be any need for him to learn World. Ann Sikorski and Gruber Dieter had been going to deal with finding Enli Brimmidin, and even they had not expected to talk to anyone else because humans on World were “unreal.” But now here were Worlders talking, and Ann wasn’t even planetside yet.

The big alien turned to the bigger one and spoke rapidly, obviously translating. The ridges on both their skulls wrinkled horribly. The translator turned back to Kaufman. “You are welcome to World. I am Enli Pek Brimmidin. This is Hadjil Pek Voratur, head of the Voratur household.” The large native thrust his bouquet at Kaufman.

So this was Enli Brimmidin, the alien that Ann Sikorski sought, the one who had helped the previous team escape from Voratur’s household with their lives after humans had been found unreal by the local priesthood. No, not local—nothing on World was local, not even Voratur’s headache. Worlders “shared reality.” The mechanism was physiological, Ann said. When their perceptions of reality did not match, they got terrible headaches. Culture on World, and nowhere else in the sentient universe, was monolithic.

Except for perhaps Fallers.

“I am Lyle Pek Kaufman, head of the Terran household on World. I am so sorry your householder was injured on our machine for bringing the flying boat down from the sky.” God, that had better be convincing; he was flying blind here. He also hoped Enli Brimmidin’s English extended past ritual phrases.

Apparently it did. Enli Brimmidin translated for both Voratur and the others. Frowns, grimaces, skull ridges eased throughout the crowd. Even the shocked man (woman?) sat up. It was just another Terran machine; they had all seen or heard about the strange Terran machines. It wasn’t any unshared reality, such as an attack by visitors.

Voratur said something, beaming, and Enli Brimmidin translated. “World welcomes the Terran traders who return to us. May your garden please your ancestors.”

“May your garden bloom forever,” Kaufman said.

“Are Peks Sikorski, Bazargan, and Gruber with your household, Pek Kaufman?” Enli asked.

“Pek Gruber is here. Pek Sikorski arrives soon. Pek Bazargan is not with us.” Dr. Ahmed Bazargan, chief anthropologist on the previous trip, had declared himself unwilling to return to World, as well as unneeded.
“We are unreal there; you will not be able to talk to anyone. And I am too old for the danger of more field work.”

“May Pek Gruber’s garden and Pek Sikorski’s garden perfume the souls of their ancestors.”

“May your garden bloom forever,” Kaufman said, knowing he was sounding repetitious. What was expected of him next? Why couldn’t they have come when Ann Sikorski was here?

“The household of Voratur invites Pek Kaufman, Pek Sikorski, and Pek Gruber to eat the sunset meal tomorrow,” Enli Brimmidin said.

“We accept with pleasure,” Kaufman said. “Pek Sikorski and Pek Gruber will want to see you and Pek Voratur again.” At least he could ensure that Ann got to see Enli.

“And it may be that Pek Voratur and the Terrans will plant a bargain together.”

So that was it. Kaufman suddenly felt better. Trade he could handle. Ann and Gruber could sort out the intricacies of reality, unreality, and how humans had apparently changed categories.

“Yes, we can talk trade.”

“May your blossoms flourish in the soul of the First Flower,” said Enli, with an abrupt return to polished ritual phrases.

“May your blossoms … uh … bloom forever.” Kaufman was aware of not keeping up his end of flowery variations.

More flowers were handed to him and to the security chief, who took them only after Kaufman told her to. She had held a laser gun trained the entire time on the aliens, who apparently didn’t recognize it as a weapon. Good thing. The alien lying on the ground stood up, and the group moved off.

“Captain Heller,” Kaufman said, “new standing orders, Patrol the perimeter but don’t fence it.”

“Sir, I don’t—”

“No fence, Captain. Double the patrol to prevent stealing.” Worlders were a larcenous lot, he remembered from the datacubes. Apparently, transferring ownership of objects did not, in itself, violate shared expectations of reality.

“Yes, sir,” Heller said. “Anything else, sir?”

“Yes. All personnel are to attend briefing sessions held by Dr. Sikorski as soon as she lands.
All
personnel.”

“Yes, sir.” Heller’s tone spoke volumes. “What is the subject of the briefing sessions, sir?”

“Interaction with natives.” Kaufman considered. “And the language of flowers.”

“
Flowers
, sir?”

“Flowers,” Kaufman said, and the security chief remained silent.

*   *   *

Tom Capelo gritted his teeth as he lowered himself down the narrow rock chimney. Karim Safir, below him, had used nanos to drive strong pitons into the chimney wall. Nanos could have widened the chimney, too, but Dieter Gruber, above him, was in too much of a hurry to use them. Gruber held the other end of a rope around Capelo’s waist; a blazing powertorch illuminated every wrinkle in the rock; Gruber’s ample body would cushion any fall. Capelo still didn’t like it.

“Did Sir Isaac Newton have to go crawling around caves to advance physics?” he called up to Gruber. “Did Einstein? Did Yeovil?”

“They were not so lucky as you,” Gruber called back. “Do not land on Karim.”

Safir wouldn’t care if he did, Capelo thought. Nothing disturbed the young spelunker, and little disturbed Gruber. It made them easy to work with—unlike, say, that idiot Albemarle—but it also made Capelo feel tense by contrast.

The chimney was so narrow he scraped his elbow. How would the massive Gruber get down it? Not Capelo’s problem. He felt with his boot for the next piton, and encountered floor. Grateful, he twisted his body to look for Safir. The sergeant was inserting himself into a small horizontal cave, one hand waggling behind for Capelo to follow.

“Down the rabbit hole. Oh, my ears and whiskers,” Capelo said, but no one heard him. He wriggled after Safir, scraping the side of his face bloody, an event he noted in language foreign to Lewis Carroll.

But it was worth it when they reached the buried artifact.

Only one small section of it was visible, a curve of smooth metal rising from the floor of a small irregular cave. From the visible part, Capelo estimated that the artifact was a sphere twenty-five meters or so in diameter. He touched the metal reverently, then unbuckled his instruments from his suit. Safir watched him, faintly smiling, but Capelo was oblivious. He didn’t even register that Gruber, unable to fit into the tiny space with the other two men, crouched in the mouth of the cave.

“Surface seems to be made of some allotropic form of carbon, like fullerenes,” Capelo said for the benefit of his recorder. “No visible markings, no burn or scorch marks, no discolorations. It is not presently emitting any radiation. Nor do the rocks in the surrounding cave wall show any radioactivity—”

“I said all that in my initial report!” Gruber protested. Capelo didn’t hear him. He went on taking measurements and recording everything he could think of, and only when he was done did he look up to see both men watching him in the uneven shadows from the powertorch, their faces as blackened with rock dust as he supposed his must be.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this cork out of its bottle.”

*   *   *

The rest of the day, the huge digger destroyed the small upland valley. The stream was diverted into a new nano-dug hole to flow downward into; oblivion. Flowers and foliage disappeared. Block after block of ground was sliced by lasers, grappled onto by nanofasteners, and lifted by the hovering, workaholic digger. The problem was, there was no place to put the blocks.

The hole that Gruber was so carefully engineering would be forty meters in diameter and almost a quarter kilometer deep. The sides of the hole were being fortified with the same nanocoating that kept the lifted blocks of dirt-plus-boulders neatly together and securely fastened to the grapplers. The hole would not cave in, and the blocks would not crumble and rain back into the hole. But forty meters across pretty much defined the entire valley. The blocks had to be individually, slowly, lifted over the surrounding mountains and set down wherever there was room.

“This will take longer than we thought,” Kaufman said, watching.

“Ja,” Gruber replied, without regret, “but we will get there. We can work through the night, easy. Look, Lyle, at that striation. Ten thousand years of geologic history on the side of a cube of dirt!”

Kaufman couldn’t find the rock strata as compelling as Gruber did. “How long do you think it will be before the natives notice that we’re dicing and rearranging their planet?”

But Gruber seemed as little interested in native reaction as Kaufman was in hole digging. Kaufman sighed. Maybe, since the excavation was all occurring within the Neury Mountains where natives never went, they wouldn’t ever know about the strip mining.

Another concern presented itself. He would have to walk back through the tunnels. Crewmen had begun widening the narrowest of these and draining the wettest, using nano and lasers under the supervision of an experienced mining tech. But the work was far from finished.

To Kaufman’s surprise, Capelo walked with him.

“I’d have thought you would have slept right next to the hole,” Kaufman said lightly. He wasn’t driven into a rage by Capelo’s abrasive remarks as Albemarle always was, but he couldn’t say he liked the young physicist, either.

“My kids came down on the second shuttle run,” Capelo said. “I can’t supervise here without having dinner with them and saying good night.”

“Of course,” said Kaufman, who didn’t have and didn’t want children.

“By the way,” Capelo said abruptly as they turned the corner of a smooth round lava tunnel, “where’s Marbet Grant been lately?”

“Marbet?”

“Yes, you know—our diminutive, red-headed, over-engineered Sensitive. It’s not like we have scads of them on board. Isn’t she supposed to help Ann Sikorski play liaison with the natives?”

“She was,” Kaufman said easily, “and she was scheduled to come down with Ann. But I got a comlink from the
Shepard
a few hours ago. Marbet’s caught some sort of virus, and ship’s doctor has quarantined her in orbit until he knows exactly what it is.”

Capelo glanced at him. “That’s funny. I should think any virus any of us had picked up on Mars would have shown up before now. Like Gruber’s did.”

“There are a lot of mutated viruses whose replicating behavior we don’t understand yet,” Kaufman said, hoping this was true. Biology was not his forte. “Why do you ask?”

“My girls asked. She played with them, and Sudie especially misses her.”

“Well, there will be a lot of new things for them to see down here,” Kaufman said.

“Yes. But I’m glad we have that electronic perimeter. These natives are the same ones that killed two human kids in the previous expedition, you know. Cut their throats. Bastards decided the kids weren’t ‘real.’”

“Yes,” Kaufman said neutrally. He thought quickly. Would it be better to encounter Capelo’s rage, or lose his trust through implied lies?

“Actually, Tom, we’ve had to turn off the perimeter. But we’ve doubled guard patrols and—”

Capelo stopped walking and turned to face Kaufman. In the tunnel shadows thrown by the powertorch his face looked eerily distorted. “Turned off the perimeter?”

“The Worlders have changed their minds and decided humans
are
real, after all. One of the aliens got badly shocked on the fence. It violates their shared perceptions of reality, which we can’t afford, Tom.”

Capelo said flatly, “Because it’s their planet.”

“Yes, it’s their planet,” Kaufman said, and waited for the explosion.

It didn’t come. Capelo resumed walking, picking his way over a spate of rubble fallen from the tunnel wall. “In that case, I’m moving my kids to the digging site.”

“To the site? But—”

“The natives won’t go into the Neury Mountains at all. Religious taboo. Didn’t you do your prep, Colonel?”

Kaufman didn’t allow himself temper. “But if the artifact does send out a wave, or blow in some way—”

“If it blows like the first artifact did, the whole planet goes. And I think the possibilities of setting off a wave inadvertently are less than that of crazed religious aliens attacking my children. The first expedition set off that wave deliberately, you know. They didn’t deliberately get their kids murdered.”

“Tom, it isn’t—”

“Listen, Lyle,” Capelo said, stopping again, “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t even expect you, or the entire Solar Alliance military that you represent, to protect me and mine. You’ve already amply demonstrated your failure at that. So I’m doing this my way. My kids go back with me tomorrow morning, and they stay locked in the shuttle tonight.”